Toshiba Laptop Running Slow and Freezing? Top 6 Issues & Fixes

If your Toshiba laptop starts to act up: it runs slow on Windows 10, hangs up more often, or keeps freezing and not responding, etc; You'd better watch out. Because the situation could get worse.

It doesn't matter whether you use an old Toshiba Satellite or a brand new one, your PC will run slower over time. Similar to a car, without proper maintenance, its life would end sooner.

In this article, we're going to show you 6 common performance issues (and relevant fixes) related to Toshiba laptops. Hopefully, you'll figure out the reasons why your laptop is slow or freezing, then speed it up.

Note: the guide is made to tune up Toshiba laptops (Satellite, Portege, T-series, C-series, A-series, etc) with Microsoft Windows 7, 8, 10 operating system that can boot up normally. If it won't start up, call Toshiba support immediately and let them take your computer for further technical diagnosis.

Issue 1: Toshiba Laptop Mouse Frozen

Symptoms: the laptop touchpad or external USB mouse cursor randomly freezes, and the cursor doesn't respond when you try to move it around.

How to unfreeze:

Step 1: test if the touchpad is enabled. Press "Fn" + "F9" keys at the same time (for some Toshiba models, try "F5" alone instead). This keyboard shortcut is designed to enable or disable the touchpad software. See if it works.

Step 2: if step 1 doesn't work out. Now shut down your computer, remove the power cord, flip over your laptop and remove the battery, then put the battery back and plug in the power cable, turn on your Toshiba. This should make it work.

Issue 2: Toshiba Laptop Overheating

Symptoms: your laptop heats up very quickly with loud fan noise, sometimes it shuts down unexpectedly.

Possible causes:

The heatsink's radiator is dusty and is unable to properly cool down the CPU.

Your laptop is exposed to an environment with high temperature.

You are running multiple heavy programs (Adobe Photoshop, video editing tools, etc) at once, using lots of system resources.

You are playing video games with external consoles connected.

Fixes:

Clean the heatsink. See the video tutorial (below).

Buy a laptop cooling mat or pad.

Avoid running several programs at once. Using your laptop for gaming is not recommended.

Issue 3: Toshiba Laptop Slow On Startup

Symptoms: your laptop takes much longer to fully start up or launch to the first screen. Even worse, it freezes on startup and you have to give it a hard reboot.

Possible causes:

There are too many auto startup items.

Windows is installing new updates.

Your computer is infected with malware.

How to optimize:

Disable programs and services automatically run on startup. You can do so by using CleanMyPC (via the "Autorun" feature).

Have a better web browsing habit: close those pages you no longer need to view.

Remove or disable plugins you don't use. You can get this done easily with CleanMyPC (via the "Extensions Manager" feature).

Use a modern browser such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and make sure it's up to date.

Issue 5: Toshiba Laptop Keeps Freezing

Symptoms: your laptop freezes every 5 or 10 minutes, or it freezes randomly; When that happens, it either comes with a page delay or becomes totally unresponsive — and you have to force quit the browser or restart your computer.

Possible causes:

Overheating, as introduced in the "Issue 2" section.

Third-party software issue, especially those applications that demand more resources to run.

Device driver issues. Drivers are the bridges for hardware to communicate with operating system, if they get corrupted or dated, the computer system can freeze.

Cluttered system registry errors.

Your laptop's specifications are lower than optimal for running the latest Windows 10.

Computer viruses.

Fixes:

Refer back to "Issue 2" above for how to solve overheating problems.

Make sure all your programs are up to date. Also try to avoid opening several applications at once.

Use DriverFinder to check and update all Windows drivers to most current version, and uninstall problematic drivers.

Run CleanMyPC (the "Registry Maintenance" feature) to detect and fix registry errors.

Downgrade to a lower Windows OS. Here is a tutorial on how to go back to Windows 7 or 8 from latest Windows 10.

Issue 6: Toshiba Laptop Runs Slow In General

Symptoms: your laptop is still slow and glitchy, even if you've applied some of the solutions above.

Clean up hard drive. The quickest way is to use CleanMyPC to find and delete unnecessary files and programs. You can also do this manually, e.g. start with those folders where large, duplicated items exist, transfer or remove them. Also, uninstall unused programs.

Upgrade hardware. Adding extra RAM is you often use your Toshiba laptop for photo/video editing; If you can afford an SSD, do that and the investment will boost your Toshiba laptop and take the performance to a new level.

Final Words

It can be very frustrating to see a normal Toshiba laptop starts to run slow or suffer other issues. Due to the nature of technology — every tech (old and new) has a lifespan, it's sometimes inevitable to encounter performance issues. However, if you take good care of your Toshiba laptop — have good using habits, spend some time or money on maintenance, it can still run strong and does its job to serve your computing needs.